That is an example of how the horoscope widget would output your zodiac sign’s daily horoscope.

It’s written in the stars, as some people would say. As such, they’d like to know what their horoscopes are every single day! Oh boy, it’s not just enough to look at it from the newspaper. You just have to share it with everybody else who is reading your blog! It’s part of the fun and for some people, the paranoia that the stars are conspiring against you.

Patrick Chia has a plugin for those who would like such a thing on their blogs. This WordPress geek seems to have a lot of widgets on his projects page. Anyhow, the horoscope widget gets the daily horoscope from Evled.com’s horoscpe section.

Good things:
You could have a cute header text describing that section of your blog. You could have something like “Signs and wonders: A Gemini’s daily horoscope” or “Written in the stars for Aries” or even “Zodiac Crazy Scorpio.” Nice, right? It would be easy to fit in your blog’s overall look and feel.

You could easily just select your zodiac sign from the drop-down list when you customize it from the Presentation; Sidebar Arrangement; Widgets part of your blog. If you’re not certain what your zodiac sign is, there’s no need to worry. The dates are included in the list, just right beside the particular zodiac sign. Nifty huh?

The not so good things:
Wouldn’t it be better if there’s an image associated with the zodiac signs? In newspapers, it’s easy to find the zodiac signs because of the symbols included.
If you don’t like the source of the horoscopes, you can’t really change it unless you can tweak the widget itself so that you could have a different source.

As far as placing the usual ad codes such as the ones you get from Google or Amazon, no longer will you have to tinker around with the themes, the sidebar.php in particular, to properly install the codes and get the great layouts in your blog.

Before widgets came, identifying the best place to put your code was always a problem. Also, making sure that the default layout will not be altered was a cause for alarm as normally, improper coding may wreck the entire theme that you have chosen for your site.

Ideally, it does seem easy. You don’t have to be that advanced in placing widgets. All you have to do is do to the design menu of WordPress and choose widgets and you can see the various options on the left side to which you can add according to your desire.

The text widget there is where you can add codes. Just add it and then edit and place the codes there without putting anything on the title bar. You may want to use the center option in case alignment issues may suffice.

With these widgets, you no longer have to edit your theme. Just bring up the widgets menu and get the text button widget and you can instantly place (or remove) your widget containing the affiliate codes without worrying of affecting your entire WordPress Blog theme.

Hurtonly.com has reportedly offered two widgets that people can place on other social networking sites such as MySpace or standard website pages. Especially if you are a member of Hurtonly.com, you can be able to download the said widget and place it on your site.

When you install this widget, it provides you with a feed-type of a production as whenever new posts on articles or updates are done, you can immediately see them through the widget installed in your site. In fact, you can go as far as seeing various images uploaded on the site itself, offering you a variety of ways to access the site without having to be at the actual site.

On a business aspect, you can see that such a widget allows more traffic to Hurtonly.com. Add to this, they have also added a Kinetic Energy Calculator widget which helps people in how much kinetic energy they are using through archery and firearm equipment.

HuntOnly.com’s developers have also setup a Kinetic Energy Calculator for your use. Everyone is curious how much kinetic energy your archery or firearm equipment is producing, but the calculations are a little complex at best. No more, HuntOnly.com now has an easy way to get this information. You plug in the weight of your arrow or bullet, and speed in FPS and with one click you have your kinetic energy.

Talk about technology, one has to wonder if using widgets would indeed be impressive and appealing towards the eyes of people who browse the web today. Widgets have become the new boom and resort for people who look for new ways to improve the current technology of site presentation and scripting and surely, web administrators would immediately study this development and apply them towards their websites at the earliest possible time.

Websites can be appealing and attractive at anytime through a person’s imagination. Technology can help but if a person would put his mind to it, he can resort to other details to be able to do so. Advanced scripting and programming can be an asset, but not really required. Widgets are on the line of advanced methods but while they are impressive fruits of technology, failure to place and use them in the manner that they should be may end up ruining the whole website presentation.

While people may sometimes find themselves in a site where a lot of reading materials in the form of blog entries would be found, looking for other interesting parts of their blog is another aspect for their stay. Widget technology has offered a lot of enhancements such as games and making search queries that depend on the type of widget tool that they have installed to complement the overall value of the site. It all depends on forecasting what a person would want to see once they reach the blog roll page where information is still the primary purpose for their stay.

With over a dozen widgets to choose from, a blog administrator can only do much. It is not about putting all the widgets at will so that they can boast of being in with the times of latest technology breakthroughs. A proper selection process must also be implemented since overdoing it may push visitors to go elsewhere to blogs that offer a more orderly presentation of their blog site.

We all know that widgets have made life a lot easier for us but it still remains that we have to choose the widgets we choose and where we get them. Facebook, fast growing and becoming one of daily tasks that people would want to look into when they get to log on to the web has a number of widgets which you can place on the left side of your profile. With all the programs that Facebook offers, you can imagine at the number of Facebook widgets you can put. But other than overdoing it, there are reportedly privacy risks you may want to check out which can do more harm than entertainment for you.

“Everything requires you to give access to personal information or it forces you to ask your friends to do the same—it becomes a real nuisance,” said David Dixon, 40, an information technology consultant who recently deleted most of the applications he had downloaded to his Facebook profile after reading on a blog that developers may have access to his information. “Why does a Sudoku puzzle have to know I have two kids? Why does a postcard need to know where I went to college?”

Indeed this quote has a lot to desire. The relation of accessing personal information for some form of entertainment and recreation for a social networking site will certainly seem annoying. If you are a Facebook user, you have to wonder if these widgets were developed on purpose or not.

But if you are a seasoned programmer for these widgets, you should know beforehand. Programming will always have something hidden and apparently this has been one thing that is revealed and may work against this large social networking site famous today.

The power of widgets is pretty obvious and with technology making things and loose ends meet, looking for the best software to create your own widget has likewise been something most online experts are looking for.

iWidgets has given this need much thought and has introduced a new way to help people adhere this need. Widgets are key experts towards helping build and strengthen networks onto social marketing sites and portals but the main agenda is to be able to create and design widgets that can do that exact purpose for them.

The demand is evident and the attention and focus for such widgets today has been a growing need. It has indeed helped a lot and for most widget enthusiasts, this is another step towards improving site optimization and awareness which is surely something that most web developers are gearing for.

“Private beta users were so enthusiastic about iWidgets, we knew the market was ready,” said Peter Yared, CEO of iWidgets. “Our robust tools provide an unmatched ability to display personalized content from a source website without requiring experienced programmers. The result is incredibly viral – a fun, interactive application people want to use and share.”

Traffic is something sacred and for most web developers, they will go at anything to make it happen. Widgets have been around but the real value of using one has yet to be realized. But now that they have been acknowledged as one of the main traffic generators, iWidget just made things practical and easier for people wanting much longed for traffic today.

Widgets are the new way of enhancing online marketing these days and apparently these tools allow a certain site to be able to keep subscribers up to date each time there is something new unleashed by this group. Normally pushed as a matter of convenience, allowing potential visitors the luxury of simply starting up and just checking out a certain widget takes out the need to surf or log on to the site which may or may not frequently update their site.

On the part of a company, these are indeed handy marketing plan tools. Customers want an easier life and through widgets, they can be able to turn on their PC and see if there is indeed something new. It brings a sense of networking in a sense considering that the more people who use a particular widget, the better it is for any company. It only shows how many people are interested in a particular site and its offerings and closely monitoring activities to make sure that they are kept abreast with any developments once the site administrator does so.

This new dimension of broadening the marketing perspective can be categorized on the technological external forces available on the web today. People appreciate technology and integrating them into marketing plans will definitely be a welcome note. Other than trying to impress anybody, widgets used as a marketing tool does help broaden the perspective. Eventually, most companies who invest in online exposure will follow suit as well.

If you think widgets are simply made for impressing people, guess again. These technological innovations are likewise marketing tools in play today especially for business ventures that use the web as its alternative resource in operations. Widgets development is one thing but placement in proper channels is another. Placement for distribution will carry with it additional costs and while we tend to ignore this side of widgets, they are profitable for the developers if you think of it.

You can just imagine the number of people who will download and install widgets these days. Acting as a medium towards bringing updates and applications right on the very desktop of their patrons, their engagement fee alone can exhaust an advertiser’s budget. So you can just imagine the amount to invest in widget technology, all for the sake of making right business online.

Taking it as a business perspective with strategic directives, widgets are indeed something that can be similar to common marketing channels we use today. Advertising will always have its budget allocation but when you talk about web advertising, it is entirely different.

Advanced investments in widgets today are expected to pay off in the end. There will always be finance risks towards advertising and promotional activities. But if the returns offer a lucrative return, then why not? Just consider the number of users who go online today. Make a ratio on the probability of penetrating these millions of audiences and you may end up considering this investment as peanuts compared to what you can look forward to as far as revenue generation is concerned.

“Everyone has their hand out for payment along the way and it can be a real drag on a campaign,” said Daniel Taylor, senior analyst of digital advertising at The Yankee Group, Boston. Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer, echoed Taylor’s sentiment: “When I look at the widget marketplace, I think back to the days of the Web when Web developers had their hands out for everything too.”

Marketers are projected to spend $40 million this year, up from $15 million last year, toward creating, promoting and distributing widgets, per eMarketer, New York. That figure represents about 2.5% of the $1.6 billion expected for U.S. social network ad spending, up from 1.6% of the $920 million spent on social network advertising last year.

One thing that makes sites successful these days is through interaction and allowing visitor to share their opinion as well as being able to solicit advice. Rather than limiting it to the point where bloggers or authors are the ones that control the flow of conversations, posts and comments, RSS widgets allows people to be updated on replies and current topics that can perhaps entice them to make a comment or two.

There are a lot of widgets that allows site owners to do this today. Spring Widgets and Grazr are among the leading RSS widget service providers you can check out. With a suggestion box in tow, you are sure to get more people into the fray and not to mention provide that much wanted interaction that sites long to have.

We have been getting a lot of customers asking how they can post and promote their suggestions on their website. Each SuggestionBox has its own unique RSS feed that displays the most recently updated public suggestions. You can view the feed for SuggestionBox here. Here are a few very simple widget platforms that let you integrate your suggestions into your site. They all allow you to customize the look and feel and dynamically update.

All you have to do is pick one. Try it out and see the difference. For sure somewhere along the way, you will find that one of these widgets will bolster your site as far as popularity and traffic for people who become hooked on to it.

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About

Widgets are those little tools or gadgets that can either clutter up online interfaces, or give little tidbits of information that are very accessible at a glance. Widgets have also become popular in the new media world, with various add-ons and plugins that let users manipulate their blogs and websites with drag-and-drop ease.

The Widgets Blog aims to explore how these little, trivial pieces of software can help us become more productive, and how we can maximize the use of widgets in our everyday lives. (Read more about Widgets Blog...)